Maggie Smith
Award-winning author and poet
Rainesford Stauffer
Writer, essayist, and author
On Ambition
BONUS AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy of Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful and/or Stauffer’s All the Gold Stars from FAN’s partner bookseller The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Smith and Stauffer that will start immediately after the webinar. Details on the webinar registration page.
What does it mean to own one’s ambition? What does it take to reimagine how we strive, amid burnout, pressure, and profound shifts across one’s career, life, and wants?
Join Maggie Smith (FAN ’20), poet and New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and Rainesford Stauffer (FAN ’21), journalist and author of All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, for a conversation on ambition. From norms of ambition that deem some “too ambitious,” to what kind of ambition and work are celebrated, this conversation will focus on how ambition plays out across personal, professional, and creative lives–how we shape it, and how it shapes us. Over the course of their discussion, Smith and Stauffer will explore ambition, work, and identity, and how those themes come through in their work.
Smith’s other books include Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more.
Stauffer is an author, journalist, speaker, and Kentuckian. She’s the Work in Progress columnist for Teen Vogue and wrote a column for Catapult, Gold Stars. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Scalawag, DAME Magazine, Vox, and other publications. She is the author of An Ordinary Age and is a 2022-2023 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.
This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Event Sponsors
- The Avery Coonley School
- Baker Demonstration School
- Beacon Academy
- Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School
- Chicago Jewish Day School
- Compass Health Center
- Countryside Day School
- The Cove School
- Evanston Township High School D202
- The Family Institute at Northwestern University
- Family Service Center
- Foundation 65
- Francis W. Parker School
- Glencoe D35
- Gorton Center
- Grayslake Community High School D127
- Haven Youth and Family Services
- Hyde Park Day School
- Illinois Student Assistance Commission
- Kenilworth D38
- Lake Forest Academy
- Lake Forest Community High School D115
- Lake Forest Country Day School
- Lake Michigan Association of Independent Schools
- Latin School of Chicago
- Leo Catholic High School
- Loyola Academy
- Lycée Français de Chicago
- Mindful Psychology Associates PC
- Morgan Park Academy
- New Trier High School D203
- New Trier Parents’ Association
- North Shore Country Day
- Northwestern University Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations
- Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy
- Pope John XXIII School
- Rebel Human
- Regina Dominican College Preparatory High School
- Resurrection College Prep High School
- Rogers Park Montessori School
- Roycemore School
- Sacred Heart Schools
- Santa Clara University School of Law
- Science & Arts Academy
- The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School
- Stevenson High School D125
- Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District
- Wintrust Bank
- Wolcott College Prep
- Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart
- Youth & Opportunity United (Y.O.U.)
Upcoming Events
The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature
Alan Lightman, Ph.D.
Professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT and author of seven novels
Dacher Keltner, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center, and bestselling author
ON ZOOM
The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions
Michael Norton, Ph.D.
Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Sam Sommers, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Racial Equity and Diversity Lab at Tufts University
ON ZOOM
